The World Bank and UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) announced a new partnership to help countries strengthen their learning assessment systems, better monitor what students are learning in internationally-comparable ways and improve the breadth and quality of global data on education.
This partnership is part of a collaborative effort to tackle the global learning crisis marked by the slowdown in the improvement of access to education in recent years – leaving over 262 million children, adolescents and youth out of school— and hundreds of millions who are in school but not learning enough.
“Over half of the world’s children cannot read and understand a simple story by the age of 10 – this is unacceptable. Reading and numeracy are rights and must be tackled, urgently, to ensure children can develop the fundamental skills necessary for building the strong and resilient economies of the future,” said Jaime Saavedra, World Bank Global Director for Education. “Many countries do not undertake the systematic measurement of learning needed to track progress and inform education policies. Without this data, policymakers are flying blind. This partnership will help ensure that countries have the right tools to measure learning and to close the data gaps underpinning the global learning crisis,” said Saavedra.
Both the Sustainable Development Goal on inclusive, equitable and quality Education and the education-related component of the World Bank’s Human Capital Index (HCI) released last year provide an impetus for measuring learning outcomes in internationally comparable ways, and over time.
The partnership will harness key global initiatives of the two institutions to strengthen countries’ national capacity for the design, administration and analysis of large-scale national learning assessments.
Several countries like Indonesia are already making progress in generating better data on learning, while others like Brazil and Kenya are using better data to inform policies that drive improvements in learning outcomes. The WB-UIS partnership aims to support similar efforts in many more countries around the world.
Original source: World Bank
Published on 04 July 2019
